When I Was Your Age...

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"Lemme tell you somethin', you whiny little snot There's somethin' wrong with all you kids today You just don't appreciate all the things you got We were hungry, broke, and miserable And we liked it fine that way!"

This is a Stock Phrase speech by any character denigrating modern kids, modern conveniences, modern behavior, modern anything, against the standards of the speaker's past. It doesn't matter how many conveniences or benefits are available now; the speaker of the When I Was Your Age rant will not waver in his view that They Changed It, Now It Sucks.

The most common version of this trope is for the speaker to criticize young people as having things easy compared to the hardships of the past; the When I Was Your Age rant almost always concludes that these advantages have made the young people of today soft, lazy, spoiled, or worse; the hardships gave people moral fiber.

This is a perennial favorite of the Grumpy Old Man or Racist Grandma, and is often played for comedy — expect to hear some variation of "I had to walk fifteen miles (because it's always fifteen miles, don't question it) to school in the snow! Barefoot! Uphill! Both ways!"

Benjamin J. Grimm of the Fantastic Four indulges in this from time to time, especially when comparing the undisciplined kids of today to the high-spirited teenagers of his youth. Ironically, due to Comic-Book Time, the generation at the young, disliked end of that comparison is now the generation at the old and reminiscing end.

In Monica's Gang, Jimmy Five's father once told Jimmy that, with Jimmy's allowances, he once bought stuff for home. Jimmy then asked how his parents did to live off ice cream and sweets.

The Three Caballeros: While complaining about how low his nephew's grades were, José Carioca told said nephew his grades were different back in his day. When said nephew asked how they used to be, José told the boy not to change the subject.

"When I was your age, we didn't have all this fancy shiny techno-gear! Our servant rays were made out of straw and leather!"

Calvin's dad also says this in the same episode.

Films — Animated

On Chicken Run, Fowler would carp about his days at the Royal Air Force whenever he felt the chickens went out of line. Then when they build an airplane to escape, they expect Fowler to pilot, but then he reveals that he was only a mascot at the RAF, and never actually flew a plane. Ginger gives him an inspiring speech about how "today is your day" to get him into the cockpit.

47-year-old Marty pulls this on his son in a deleted scene of Back to the Future Part II, saying that when he was his age, when he wanted to watch two shows at once, he had to put two televisions next to each other.

In The Princess Bride, the grandfather tells the kid at the beginning, "When I was your age, television was called books," before reading him the story.

Interstellar has an interesting variation where the main character's father-in-law talks about how, back in his day, inventions were being made every day and laments the sterility of the times he lives in and how his son-in-law was born in the wrong era. The twist? The old man is from our age (possibly The New '10s), and it is justified in that the world in the future is undergoing an agricultural apocalypse, and it has gotten so bad that the Moon Landings being faked is taught at schools to direct more people to working crops.

Just look at this! There's no pattern! He's always coming from the left!

Jokes

A man told his son he didn't have TV back in his day. The son then asked him what his Dad forbade him from doing as discipline.

Another joke has a grandparent make a Bait-and-Switch comment that begins like a comment about inflation:

When I was your age, my mom sent me to the store with a quarter and I came back with a loaf of bread, a bottle of milk, and a newspaper. But you can't do that anymore because there's too many surveillance cameras.

Plenty of jokes abound about how much of today's generation will be doing the same thing in the future. In the flip side, plenty of jokes also abound about people of generations past (best effective if set, at least, a century in the past) being lectured by people older than them.

There are also jokes about older people complaining about how too much of the younger generation(s) hold views that are more conservative than what they ever held.

A father tells his son: "When Abe Lincoln was your age he walked 9 miles to school and did homework by candlelight!" The son responds: "When Abe Lincoln was your age, he was the President!"

Literature

In Cloak of Shadows Storm tried to inspire young Harpers complaining about having to rise early, then Elminster finished them off with a handful of tall tales:

Storm: What sort of Knights and Harpers is Faerun breeding these days? Why, when I was your age... Sharantyr: I know, I know. [...] Then you had to run two miles to the river to bathe and draw enough water for all the horses to drink, run back with it, and get the axe to go out and chop firewood for the kitchen fires, before y— Elminster: When I was your age, axes hadn't been invented yet. Nor horses. We walked every­where to gather our firewood.

Played for Laughs in Reaper Man, where the complaining is done by an elderly mayfly, complaining to the young'uns how much more light you got back when he was a lad (i.e., several hours ago). We had a proper sun, right up in the sky, none of this red nonsense. As a contrast, there's also a forest of extremely long-lived pine trees with a particularly old one saying that they had proper glaciers back in the day.

Granny Weatherwax often does it when dealing with younger witches. In Equal Rites, when confronted with a crystal ball, she mutters "Never could get the hang of this damn silicon stuff. A bowl of water with a drop of ink was good enough when I was a girl." And in Wyrd Sisters her reaction to Magrat's New Age fripperies is "When I was a gel we had a lump of wax and a couple of pins and we had to be content. We had to make our own enchantment in them days." And in Witches Abroad, when she learns of a shortage of young girls who want to be witches, she blames it on "all this making your own entertainment. We never made our own entertainment when I was a girl. We never had time."

In The Last Continent this is one of many ways the older wizards drive Ponder Stibbons mad. When unfocused time magic turns him into an old man, he's horrified to realise he wants to say "You should've seen the temporal disturbances we will have been used to be going to get in my day."

The Martian: Mark Watney realizes that being stuck on Mars gives him an amazing opportunity for this sort of thing.

Watney: I can't wait till I have grandchildren. "When I was younger, I had to walk to the rim of a crater. Uphill! In an EVA suit! On Mars, ya little shit! Ya hear me? Mars!"

The Saga of the People of Vatnsdal: When Thorstein Ketilson is eighteen, his father (a former viking) chews him out for supposedly being a lazy coward for not going out and putting his life at risk for money and fame. Thorstein is so upset, he sets out all alone on a forest road preyed on by bandits, and ends up killing the highwayman Jokul. As he returns victoriously, he meets Ketil and his family looking for him, and Ketil admits that he has been regretting his tirade already.

"The behaviour of young men today is not what it was when I was young. In those days men hankered after deeds of derring-do, either by going raiding or by winning wealth and honour through exploits in which there was some element of danger. But nowadays young men want to be stay-at-homes, and sit by the fire, and stuff their stomachs with mead and ale; and so it is that manliness and bravery are on the wane."

In The Midnight Folk, Kay's governess and her friend Mrs Tattle have a session of complaining about what young people these days are coming to, and how none of them are "what we were when we were girls". "Which," the narrator drily notes, in the case of the boy Kay "was very likely true."

Live-Action TV

Our Miss Brooks: In "Blue Goldfish", Miss Brooks is delegated to ask Mr. Conklin to raise the heat in the school. Mr. Conklin subjects Miss Brooks to a lecture about how soft people have gotten, unable to stand a little "fresh air." Mr. Conklin laments that Americans are no longer able to live up to the example set by George Washington at Valley Forge. An example of Hypocritical Humor, the only reason Mr. Conklin is able to stand the cold is that he's sitting on a heating pad.

Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" segments in the late 1980s would regularly feature Dana Carvey's "Grumpy Old Man" delivering one of these as a commentary. He'd always glamorize the past even as he described it in the most horrific terms.

"Everything today is improved and I don't like it. I hate it! In my day we didn't have hair dryers. If you wanted to blow dry your hair you stood outside during a hurricane. Your hair was dry but you had a sharp piece of wood driven clear through your skull and that's the way it was and you liked it! You loved it. Whoopee, I'm a human head-kabob! We didn't have Manoxidol and Hair Wings, in my day if your hair started falling out when you were 16, by 19 you were a bald freak. There was nothing you could do about it. Children would spit at you and nobody would mate with you so you couldn't pass on your disgusting baldness genes. You were a public menace, a chromedome by age 20 and that's the way it was and we liked it! We loved it! Hallelujiah look at me, I'm a bald freak, O happy day!"

And about a decade later, Garth Brooks played another such character on the fake game show Who's More Grizzled? ("When I was your age, we didn't call our elders by their Christian names.")

"You were lucky to have a lake! There were 150 of us living in t' shoebox in t' middle o' road." "And when we got home, our dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves, singing "Halleluja"!" "Paradise!" "...right!"

Subverted in one episode of Mama's Family where Bubba asks Mama for $15 to take a date to the movie. Mamma gets upset about the price, then starts to tell Bubba how her dates with her (deceased) husband were cheaper, then starts to explain one said date in detail... Then she remembers exactly what they did on that date, and gives Bubba thirty dollars quickly, telling him to enjoy the movie.

In Are You Being Served?, Mrs. Slocombe will complain about a junior salesperson's behavior or attitude by stating, "When I was a junior ... ."

In Blue Bloods, Nicky manages to convince her mother Erin to let her stay out until 11 PM. Erin's grandfather points out that he was "out on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific at her age!"

Variatoin in CSI Brass and someone else are investigating a guy who died while playing video games. When they go to question people at a tournament, Brass, a Vietnam veteran, spots a kid playing a Shoot 'em Up type game.

Brass: When I was their age, I was in a real jungle, using a real gun, fighting a real war.

Every night for dinner, we had a big old chunk of dirt / If we were really good, we didn't get dessert! ... Nobody ever drove me to school when it was 90 degrees below / Had to walk butt naked, through 40 miles of snow!

George Hrab's When I Was Your Age is a mild version, culminating in a Not So Different view.

Frank Hayes wrote When I Was A Boy, which is When I Was Your Age for the IT industry. It Culminates with

And we did all our coding in 1's and in 0's, and sometimes we ran out of 1's!

Programmer: When I started programming we didn't have any of these sissy "icons" and "windows". All we had were zeros and ones — and sometimes we didn't even have ones. I wrote an entire database program using only zeros.

Dilbert: You had zeros? We had to use the letter "O".

Inverted in a Mafalda strip where she comments with Miguelito how it dawned on her that the twenty-something year olds of today who complain about the older generations nagging them, will be the ones to nag on her generation tomorrow. Hilarity ensues.

Spoofed in a Calvin and Hobbes strip in which Calvin imagines himself as Spaceman Spiff being hauled off to a torture chamber by disgusting aliens. Spiff is surprised to find himself in an exact replica of his parents' living room, and one of the aliens announces that Spiff will be subjected to "a calm discussion of wholesome principles." The next panel shows a Big "NO!" from Calvin in the "real world" as his father spouts various Standard '50s Father cliches. ("Yes, life is tough and suffering builds character! Nothing worth having ever comes easy! Virtue is its own reward" - and then the Trope Namer.)

Garfield: When he had Jon's age, Jon's Dad was already married and had a kid. Jon's reply ("Yeh, me") prompted him to state it was a good argument but he still thought Jon should get married.

Puppet Shows

This is played with in "A Beary Bear Christmas" from Bear in the Big Blue House. When Jack overhears that the kids of the Big Blue House are having trouble thinking of a present for Bear, he tells them that when he was a pup, one had to walk miles and miles just to get to the store. "You did that?!" ask the kids, amazed, and he admits that no, he didn't. He and his friends made gifts for their parents and they loved them all the same.

Radio

In Lum And Abner, any time Lum prepares to give a speech he invariably talks about being a "barefoot kid of a boy" having to walk several miles to school in the snow.

Cedric: I like to hear Mr. Lum's speeches, so's I can hear how many miles and how many feet of snow it is this time.

Stand-Up Comedy

Bill Cosby has a stand-up routine about grandparents where he talked about how grandfathers always talk about how much tougher they had it in their day, especially about how they had to walk to school in the snow. He mentions a friend whose grandfather spent his entire life in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and still claimed that he had to walk to school in the snow.

Walter: When I was young I had to walk five miles to get a condom! Uphill. In the snow. With a boner.

Apparently, Louie Anderson's father was always telling his kids how tough he had it. "When I was a kid, we didn't have [Christmas tree stands]! We had to take turns holdin' that tree!" "When I was a kid, we didn't have schools! I had to find smart people and follow 'em around!" note "So you never found anyone, huh, Dad?" And Louie ponders: "What are we gonna tell our kids? 'I didn't get cable till I was 12!'"

Doc: Why, when I was your age— Action: When you was my age; when my old man was my age; when my brother was my age! You was never my age, none of you! The sooner you creeps get hip to that, the sooner you'll dig us.

Cranky: Look at all these buttons! Back in MY day, kids were ecstatic if we gave them two of 'em to press! And these colors! We only had four shades of gray in a 2x2 character block, and we were happy! And we never had any of this fancy 3-D stuff, either! No, we had to survive on what we had! And what little we did have, we were happy with! Well, I've never seen anything like it!

Cranky: Oh, look who's come crawling back for advice, even though things are easier than ever! Why don't you ask your newfangled super guide for help? Back in my day, we had to play through the levels ourselves! And this controller-shaking thing? We didn't need fancy doodad-filled remotes... four buttons, that's all we had! Also, what's the big deal about playing simultaneously nowadays? When I was younger, we had to be tagged in to play...! Beat as Cranky tags in an ape just offscreenElderly Diddy Kong: ...And by gum, Junior, we liked it!

EverQuest added into the game an NPC "Old Man McKenzie". The official description of him is:

"Old Man McKenzie, a frequent patron of the taverns in the Plane of Knowledge, thinks you adventurers have it too easy these days! Back in his day they didn't have all this fancy armor and magical weaponry, they relied on their wits and not a little luck to survive! Think you've got what it takes to survive in McKenzie's Gold era?"

In the finale of the Guild Wars Beyond: War In Kryta storyline, you can see a group of old men complaining about how the victory was hardly heroic by their standards, mocking actions taken by the developers in reducing difficulty and adding controllable "hero" characters.

Antwyn: Hah? These young'ns call this a final battle? Back in my day, we didn't have these newfangled Asuran magics to protect us from Spectral Agony. We just had to tough it out. Kids these days don't know how good they've got it! Jorith: I remember the day you had to walk fifteen miles uphill in the Shiverpeaks, then kill a spectral abomination just to get one piece of armor infused! And we liked it that way! Carden: That's nothing! You wouldn't be sitting here if me and my two buddies hadn't killed the Lich Lord twice while he was on the bloodstone. And we did it without help from any fancy pants heroes.

In Katawa Shoujo, Jigoro Hakamichi, Shizune's father, does this repeatedly, even when his complaints are false (claiming that Yamaku students don't have cleaning duty) or exceptionally petty (bringing up the ratio of desks to student council members, and claiming his student council met in less luxurious conditions).

Dragon Quest VII has Grandma Pendragon complain bitterly about how the Lefans are becoming overreliant on the BlissRock, which keeps ideal levels of wind constantly circulating through Gorges. She insists that it's more important to mantain the Fane, and is proven right when the wind stops entirely, stranding all the Lefans on their backs.

Played for Laughs in The Lost Vikings. If the player fails a level 16 times, the voice of Thor comes out and admonishes the titular trio of Vikings for their repeated failures. It degenerates when the heroes start poking holes in Thor's story.

Each of the three Hag Sisters in Super Paper Mario has their own rambling rant to go on if you refuse to do a favor for them, of the "we respected our elders" variety. Hagnes's subverts this, however.

Hagnes: Eh?! You know, I heard that young'uns these days do not respect their elders... Hmph! Why, back in my day... Back in my day... Come to think of it, I gave my elders nothing but grief in my day! I guess we really do reap what we sow... Well, life kind of makes sense now.

Taizo Hori (aka Dig Dug) rambles about this when he feels overshadowed by the popularity of his son Susumu (aka Mr. Driller).

Susumu is all they ever talk about these days! I'M the first driller and the honorary chairman. I was about his age when I wrapped the Dig Dug incident all by myself! My drilling skills are second to none, and certainly not Susumu!

In the Team Fortress 2 supplemental comics, the Demoman's mother criticizes him for being too lazy and discriminating with the jobs he takes (despite working three jobs, making 5 million dollars in a single year, and living in a mansion); apparently his father, Tavish, had to work 26 jobs at once to make a living, still found time to teach his son the Family Business, and apparently once walked 15 miles through the rain to blow up the Queen of England... For a nickel.

In Overwatch, Soldier: 76 will occasionally comment when on the attack on a payload map, "Back in my day, we'd have this payload delivered already!"

Kathryn: Did you just play the "I walked uphill both ways to school" card? General Tagon: Bliss Hive's gravity generators were flaky, so they cycled 'em mid-shift. It actually was uphill both ways. Kathryn: Unless you walked in the snow, I don't care.

Of course, you kids today with your crazy internally-consistent skills system. Back in my day we just had Nonweapon Proficiencies and we liked 'em! And we would walk uphill in the snow to OUR dungeons, both ways!

When I served the royal family, we did without such silly things as "lunch breaks" or "steady pay".

In a The Hero of Three Faces strip, Luke Skywalker claims that due to the tidal effects of a double sun on sand, the route from Uncle Owen's farm to his school really was uphill both ways - the dunes shifted during the day.

In the second Dumbing of Age strip, Joyce's dad looks round her dorm room and says that when he was at college they assembled their beds out of boards they found on the street, and if you wanted to use the internet, you had to leave the dorm, take the elevator down to the lobby, and then invent the internet.

"This never would've happened when I was a boy! You kids these days and your Millennium Items and your Card Games and your loud music and your hula hoops and your hopscotch and your dungarees and your lollipops and your Sony PlayStations and your voice-activated light switches and your leather pants and your artificial insemination..."

It was even picked up again after the credits:

"...your Blu-Ray Discs and your pierced scrotums and your bull frogs and your telekinesis and your Marvel Comics and your YouTube.com and your nuclear physics and your ingrowing toenails and your Gears of War and your Quentin Tarantino and your power steering and your elevators and your illegitimate offspring and your... Hey, why did it Fade to Black? Am I dead?"

When I was your age, we rocket jumped all the way to school uphill, both ways... IN BOILING LAVA

Referenced by John Cheese in a Cracked article when he says that, when parents talk about not having video games or Internet and playing outside when they were young, he notes that they only played outside because they had nothing better to do (video games were too expensive and there was nothing good on TV).

Beautifully subverted by The Onion (naturally), which mocked baseball's tendency to glorify the past with In My Day, Players Were For Shit. The elderly columnist waxes rhapsodic about such legendary players as "Walter 'Shitty Batter' Dugan. They called him that because he was a real shitty batter."

Referenced in one of the old Angelfire webhost error messages, which read something along the lines of "when I was your age, the Internet had only four pages..." "Sure, Grandpa…" followed by the 4O4 message.

In Walking in Circles Krag's father Horace tries to claim they didn't have weapons when he was Krag's age. Krag then points out that the hammer he carries used to be Horace's.

On Franklin, when Franklin first went to school, he was told that his father, instead of taking a bus, had to walk two and half miles to school and back, even in the rain and the snow. His parents didn't go so far as "uphill both ways," though.

Timmy's paternal grandfather in The Fairly Oddparents is quite fond of the trope. His first non-flashback line was a rant about how he doesn't like things as how they're today when compared to what they used to be.

Bruce: I had to shut down the computer when Vance's program tried to get in. If you want out of the cave, you're going to have to do it the old-fashioned way. (he points to a big steel door with a manual winch)Terry: You're kidding. Bruce: None of the Robins ever complained.

In "The Love God", after Grunkle Stan's crappy home-made hot air balloon crashes into the Woodstick festival and causes chaos, Stan remarks "What's everyone crying about? In my day, zeppelins fell from the sky like raindrops!"

In one episode of Darkwing Duck, Goslyn claimed that Darkwing once pulled that - right after he pointed out a building as his childhood school... and the house next door as his childhood home. Then again, over the course of the series, Darkwing clearly demonstrates Multiple-Choice Past, at least one of which involved Drake obviously making stuff up on the spot.

Real Life

There are clay tablets from Sumeria, ca. 2500 BC with similar sentiments about youth not respecting their elders.

Believe it or not, old people have been complaining about young people for almost five millennia. If even half of them were right, civilization should have completely decayed by now.

Of course they were taught to be polite, wait their turn and be respectful of their elders. Like every generation before and since, they didn't pay attention then, just as today's young don't pay attention now.

Variant heard at VMI from cadets who had previously been enlisted servicemembers: "when I was in Kuwait, we had to walk three times as far to get to the bathroom."

When you find yourself saying this (or "Kids today!"), it is a sure sign that you yourself are officially middle-aged.

Very common among people playing video games. Those who complain about how easy today's games are or make fun of younger players that can't handle a difficult game are very likely to be someone who grew up on Nintendo Hard games. While games becoming easier isn't far from the truth, people that grew up on video games from the early days simply got better over time.

Bah, you young'uns have it so easy now. Back in my day, we had to figure out when the examples list ended, without your silly stingers!

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